Bicycle MechanicsBroken bottom bracket? Tacoed wheel? If you're having problems with your bicycle, or just need help fixing a flat, drop in here for the latest on bicycle mechanics & bicycle maintenance.

1) When I was tightening down the cassette lock ring, it felt like it was clicking as I tightened it. I used my experience with cars to not break anything and I just made it pretty damn tight and ignored the clicking. It looked like there was some ridges in the casting where the lockring was up against the tallest gear on the cassette. Some clarifications: I had the tool seated in the lock ring and held in with a spare quick release mechanism. I was using a foot long 1" cast wrench so there's no way my tools were making the clicking.

2) I had a complete spare drivetrain with a 12-27 cassette and a 38T inner chain ring. I reused the big chain ring from my 11-23 / 39-53 drivetrain. Everything else was already worn into itself. Said another way, I had two chains, two inner chain rings, and two cassettes. Is it likely that the big chain ring will accelerate the wearing on whichever of my drivetrains is newer?

Other than that everything went smoothly. I really was missing the short ratios. I love being able to blast away from stoplights and I believe that I was risking the potential of injuries with that 39-23 ratio. 38-27 should be more realistic for my strength.

1. The clicking is normal. The lockring as you noted has ridges cast into it that interlock with ridges on the smallest cassette cog (with a thin wave washer in between). Standard torque is 40 N*m or about 25 ft. lbs. (usually marked on the lockring) so make sure you put it pretty tight otherwise you risk damaging the freehub body. A loose cassette will rock and dig into the splines making cassette removal difficult and eventually trashing the freehub.

2. Chainrings generally wear quite slowly. As long as you keep the cassette paired with it's original chain, you shouldn't run into any accelerated wear issues. If your cassette and chain were not all that worn, mixing the chains probably wouldn't cause any problems either. The biggest wear issue you could cause is mating a new(ish) cassette with a well worn chain, in which case you'd quickly shape the cassette like the chain taking away many miles of life.